#carrion bees

[sleepy-bebby]

Vulture bees, bees that collect meat instead of pollen.

Vulture bees, a.k.a carrion bees a.k.a meat-eating bees, are stingless bees that feed on rotting meat of deceased animals. They have a special tooth used to rip the flesh off the corpse of the animal. Instead of regular honey produced from nectar, they produce “meat honey” which is a honey-like substance made from protein-rich secretions derived from the bees' diet, carrion. Vulture bees, like maggots, usually enter the carcass through the eye and then root around, consuming the rotting meat to take back to the hive. This meat is then regurgitated and turn into the substance that will be use to feed the hives’s immature bees (babees, haha, geddit?). The flavor of this “meat honey” is described as intense, smokey, and salty, or uniquely sweet.

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[hellotailor]

SCIENCE WATCH: Carrion Bees.

An entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has discovered a strain of bee that does not gather pollen from flowers. Instead, it obtains its needed protein solely by ingesting the flesh of dead animals, including lizards, monkeys, snakes, fishes and birds. Dr. David Roubik, who has been investigating bees of Central America for the past decade, discovered such behavior in populations of a stingless bee, Trigona hypogea Silvestri, in the lowland forest of eastern Panama. Studies of the bee's physiology, its nests and its foraging activities showed that the species partly digests animal flesh and then transports it to the nest where it is regurgitated to other bees. Dr. Roubik also found that the bees have no other source of protein and, in the process of evolution, have lost the hairy ''baskets'' on their rear legs that almost all other bees use to collect pollen.